


A Comprehensive Guide to Trespassers in Hadestown

by xannish



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Footnotes, Free Verse, M/M, Poetry, Rowing this canoe of a ship, business document fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 16:54:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20246164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xannish/pseuds/xannish





	A Comprehensive Guide to Trespassers in Hadestown

1\. These are the ones who come to Hadestown:  
a. The hungry, the poor, those seeking the comfort of wealth to wrap around their naked bones  
b. The working wealthy, pulling themselves to paradise by their own bootstraps (they think)  
c. Brilliant boys with eyes on fire chasing love (or, the idea of love), shining in the darkness,  
singing too loudly, spreading poetry like pomegranate seeds  
i. These are the trespassers mentioned in the document title  
ii. The walls are useless, guards worse

2\. These are what happen to trespassers in Hadestown:  
a. Betrayal when 1.(a) do not (can not) come away with them  
b. Corporal punishment, and/or expulsion, and/ or imprisonment, not to be less than three days served,  
extensible at the Administration's discretion  
i. Extended when you start a riot  
ii. Extended when Persephone defends your life (execution reluctantly postponed indefinitely)  
iii. Extended when in the black of night you sing at his* feet and he* needs you like he* needs his* own heart,  
aching, raw as memory (we have done this before)  
(* this is the Administration, author of this document, king of ghosts et cetera)  
c. Judgment, a signing of papers, a chance at freedom, a crack in the wall  
d. Failure**  
i. Always  
ii. (In this I do not make the rules)  
iii. She forgives you. He does not forgive.

** This will lead to any of these:  
1\. Suicidal desperation to return to them (this may result in success)  
2\. Wandering alone, for one lifetime or more, sometimes seeing him in shadows, in nightmares, in dreams,  
in clubs where someone shoves you hard against the wall in the dark and you remember the smell of oil and grave dust  
(she isn't there and will not be, she is mortal in case you forgot)  
3\. Forgetting  
a. Always, again  
b. Always again  
c. (The words are gone, but not the tune. Hold on to it. **Please** hold on.)  
d. Always.


End file.
